“Hey Siri — what’s the name of this song?” my tween niece asks the new Apple HomePod, a black orb of netted plastic that’s an interactive speaker you can talk to and enjoy its no-nonsense vocal responses. It stands about seven-inches-tall, it’s shaped like a futuristic sports ball with buffed, rounded edges and a flat, glowing top. It is distinctly Kubrickian.
“The song by the Beatles is ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’” Siri, or the Apple HomePod’s resident DJ — the tiny person who we all know resides inside — responds in a feathery, tranquilizing female android voice that isn’t at all … creepy.
But this is about the Beatles — the ones with Apple Records, not Apple singular — though both are capitalistic behemoths of flabbergasting muscle, might and moola.
It’s about a 12-year-old discovering the indelible Brit band if not for the first time — as a toddler her bedtime lullabies included the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Across the Universe” — then for that point in life when culture totally matters, that crucial juncture of taste-making that suffuses a being forever. Art and culture are cyclonic at this age. Their influences batter and blow, shaping aesthetic passions like sand dunes, but with much more permanence.
My niece is at that point — post-Harry Potter (she was in the stultifying wizard’s unyielding thrall for a few unholy years), post-Pokemon and their predictable kin (though Star Wars never quite captured her imagination).
No, instead she has gravitated to sophistication and kneels at the high-art altars of David Bowie, Queen, Radiohead, “Hamilton,” “The Catcher in the Rye” and (one of this film buff’s all-time favorites) “All About Eve.” She’s hankering to read “The Great Gatsby.” She performs lustily in local theater musicals. She writes wonderful poetry and is working on a novel. She reads books with dizzying voracity. I reckon she’ll be A.P. all the way.
Hell, I was a grizzled 19 when I finally and full-throatedly got the Beatles. I too had an infantile acquaintance with the group — I was smitten with “Yellow Submarine,” both the animated movie and the soundtrack, as a wee one — but there was no follow through until college.
It hit hard. I got so into every nook and cranny of the band that I was inspired to buy a harmonica and an electronic piano, both of which proved embarrassing and foolhardy acquisitions. The Beatles, like Brando and Shakespeare, were a blinding Damascus moment, earth-rattling, a crack in the cosmos. Their various looks, images, melodies, harmonies, beats, hooks and lyrics dovetailed, in my mind, into an unearthly incandescence so often ascribed to genius.
A few of my niece’s favorite Beatles songs include “Here Comes the Sun,” “Let it Be,” “I Am the Walrus” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” — as good as any Beatles starter kit as any.
These songs are easy ones, Muzak-ready, plucked off the top of any Beatles fan’s pop-addled head. Soon she’ll be singing and swaying to the likes of “Golden Slumbers,” “Norwegian Wood,” “A Day in the Life,” “Lovely Rita,” “In My Life,” “Blackbird,” “The Night Before,” and on and on. (The band recorded 213 songs.) She knows the stinkers, too. She tells Siri to skip “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” when it comes on. Even Siri loathes this song.
The depth and breadth of one’s favorite Beatles songs is unfathomable — I like almost all of them (almost). Over at Vulture, there’s a brilliantly informative and very funny list of every Beatles song ranked from worst to best. “Silver Hammer” clocks in at a charitable #182. “Ob-La-Di. Ob-La-Da” is properly called one of “the top five Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote.” It sits at #194. The worst slot, at #213, goes to “Good Day Sunshine,” a snappy McCartney ditty I rather like. (The best? Not telling. I will reveal #2: the twirling, kaleidoscopic “Strawberry Fields Forever.”)
Some think the Beatles are a band you grow out of, not into. I demur. This polymorphously gifted quartet — well, quintet; one can’t leave out uber-producer George Martin — is a perennial, one for the ages. Once bitten, you’re infected for life. Not liking the Beatles, a laughable proposition, is akin to not liking pizza, puppies or “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Like Spielberg and Mozart, they may appeal to the masses but, if you’re listening closely, that doesn’t diminish their brilliance one scintilla.
My niece is lucky. She’s just getting started, peeling back the layers and layers of Beatles enchantments, music that rewards the more you listen. “They have sweet tunes and sunny music that’s poetic,” she tells me. On the eternal, deal-breaking question “John or Paul?” she doesn’t hesitate: John.
If she sticks with them — I think she will — she’ll take some of the best artistic journeys she’ll ever take. Lucky indeed: She has a multitude of tuneful universes ahead of her.
GNASHING. 